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OSCEDAYS 2018 in Rome: circular economy for food, videogames, energy and more

Posted by marco on Monday, 25 June 2018

The proposal

Open Source Circular Economy is about reducing waste, and generate value, transforming what is the waste from one product into the input for other products and services.

The public invitation to OSCEdays 2018 Rome was for everyone interested to explore if Open Source Circular Economy could be a viable solution for:

a social problem they really care about

a project they would like to bring to life

making their current project or business more sustainable

Best Practices presented

We spent the morning looking at how Open Source Circular Economy practices are already present, or could help to improve, six very different projects or organizations that are either born in Rome, or have a strong presence in the city. Along the road, we explained several times the importance, for the Circular Economy as a whole, to not stop to make Open Source designs and business models but also to produce and reuse Open Data about the same activities.

In alphabetical order, these projects are (click on the "Intro" and "Q&A" links after each project to watch - in Italian - how they were presented and discussed at OSCEdays Rome 2018):

Alveare che dice Sì! is the italian branch/version of "The Food Assembly" (1): a network of local groups that "buy the best food available, directly from local farmers and foodmakers" because "we must put producers back in the centre, both economically, and geographically". Intro - Q&A

EquoEvento (Fair Event) is a not-for-profit organization that collects excess food from catering of public events, to donate it to charities, shelters and the needy. EquoEvento has saved from the dumpsters about 200K quality meals since 2014 "and the best thing is that, when they discover this approach, catering companies themselves DO NOT WANT TO GO BACK. They call us". Intro - Q&A

Nonsonorifiuti.it is a micro-network to buy back from consumers properly sorted "waste" (paper, plastic, wood, metals, exhausted oil, clothes...) in order to sell it to recycling companies. As its founder Silvia puts it "thi is a project straight from the people, that local administrators did not want to adopt, and citizens took in their hands". Intro - Q&A

Tibex.net is a quickly growing "circuit for commercial credit" in which more than 400 businesses and professionals in the Lazio region provide goods and services to each other (for a total value of about 7 millions Euros so far) "without touching or moving one Euro". Intro - Q&A

Other projects present at OSCEdays 2018 Rome

Besides the projects explicitly invited to be analyzed and discussed in the morning, participants also found several "information corners" prepared to present:

Riciclario, a free mobile app to learn how to reuse or properly recycle domestic waste, and manage the corresponding city taxes - Video (Italian)

and then... Sensefiction!

SenseFiction is a collective creativity workshop ran using the MakeSense methodology. In the invitation, we had asked:

"Is there an issue you care about and you'd like to help a circular solution emerge? Do you run a business and wish to make it more sustainable? Do you want to create a startup that promotes circular practices? **Come, and we will help you to figure out, using Sensefiction, how to define a feasible solution, and way to implement it.

We are happy to report that, when the moment came to ask "OK, who has ideas or requests for help to develop with Sensefiction?", more proposals emerged that we could handle in that moment. After a short group discussion, we found that the three that raised the most interest in the audience AND would be most productive to analyze with SenseFiction in that moment were the ones presented in these videos (in Italian):